What it's about:a love story across the ages - and for the ages - about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.

What it's about: Hired as a lady's maid to Margaret Carnegie, Irish immigrant Clara Kelly becomes the confidant of her mistress' son, wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie. However, their differences in station may doom their budding relationship.

Why you might like it:Carnegie's Maid offers a chaste love story and plenty of upstairs/downstairs drama, as well as a nuanced depiction of the immigrant experience in the rapidly industrializing 1860s United States.

What it's about: In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed. Friends and neighbors are shocked: could this ordinary middle-class Jewish-American couple really have sold atomic secrets to the Soviets?

Why you should read it: This haunting novel reveals a dark chapter of 20th-century American history in which anti-Semitism and Cold War paranoia collide with tragic results.

Introducing: Married American expats Sara and Gerald Murphy, who decamp to the French Riviera in the 1920s and become the center of a social circle that inspires F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night.

Look for: cameos by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso, among other Lost Generation luminaries.

You might also like: Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, whose characters and setting overlap with Villa America's as it depicts another glamorous but troubled marriage between cultural icons.